Loveless: a character study and thriller that criticises Russian society as stagnant, self-absorbed and materialist

Andrei Zvyagintsev, “Loveless” (2017)

As with previous films of Andrei Zvyagintsev that I’ve seen, “Loveless” is as much a criticism of modern Russian society and what it values as it is of the individuals who pursue hedonistic and materialist goals to the exclusion of all else. The film opens with a Moscow couple, Boris (Alexei Rozin) and Zhenya (Maryana Spivak), in the middle of divorce proceedings trying to sell their apartment to interested buyers and ignoring their only son Alexei (Matvey Novikov) who suffers in silence at his parents’ bickering. After the potential buyers leave, wanting more time to think the potential purchase over, Boris and Zhenya get stuck into tearing strips off each other while Alexei hides and cries in distress. Over the next day or so, Boris and Zhenya ignore each other by burying themselves in work during the day – and Boris worrying that his conservative Orthodox Christian bosses will turf him out if they discover that his marriage has broken up – and partying with new lovers in the evening. Eventually the couple notice that Alexei has gone missing and call the police. The police are tied up with various other cases of missing persons and refer Boris and Zhenya to a group of volunteers who help them search for Alexei.

The characters are very one-dimensional – Zhenya is a screechy, self-absorbed harpy while Boris is passive and hardly says anything much to defend himself – and everything in the film  from the cinematography and the plot to the visual narrative of various buildings (progressing from comfortable and modern to derelict and decrepit) is overloaded with symbolism and meaning, ultimately referring us to the same banal message that Zvyagintsev’s films usually broadcast: that Russia is a stagnant society given to hysteria and emotion, and Russians are a people who never learn from their mistakes. Working class people in particular come in for heavy condemnation but most significant characters in this film are obsessed with being on the make, acquiring wealth and luxury with the least amount of effort, using other people and checking social media constantly. Dysfunctional family relationships and conservative Christianity come in for heavy criticism, as though these exemplify and underline darker aspects of modern Russian culture and society.

The film’s attempt to create a parallel between Boris and Zhenya’s deteriorating relationship on the one hand and on the other hand their later relationships and even the separation of Russia and Ukraine and the resulting war in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine is clumsy and contrived. Sex scenes are far too long and do not add anything significant about the characters who engage in them. While the cinematography can be good, even beautiful (as at the beginning and the end of the film), it dwells a great deal on the bleakness of Moscow winters as a metaphor for the bleakness and apparent apathy of modern Russian life.

Ultimately the film itself takes on a hermetic and self-obsessed bent as it trudges on to a devastating climax, at which (implausibly) Zhenya still rejects Boris as he tries to comfort her. The two later go their separate ways and resume their old habits – and psychological isolation – in new surrounds with new partners. At times the action and plot narrative in the film come across as unrealistic. Zvyagintsev seems intent to keep his characters as undeveloped as can be to bang home his criticism, however deserved or undeserved, of Russia.

I can see that future films of Zvyagintsev are going to be as stagnant and unchanging in the cheap pot-shots they take at ordinary people, as the society he believes Russia to be. Unfortunately those social and other structural problems of Russian society that Zvyagintsev takes to be symptomatic of the worst aspects of Vladimir Putin’s governance and the society that has developed under his leadership – the indifference of the police towards two parents who have lost a child, the alienation of individuals within families, family conflicts that pass from one generation to the next, the insidious influence of conservative religion through elites – are readily recognised by Western audiences as also typical of their societies: these problems are ones produced by capitalist societies.